One of my favorite things about music is the way you drift in and out of levels of attention - and how lyrics reveal themselves slowly, a different line will pop out. Or you'll notice some new feature of the arrangement or instrumentation. Outside the reviewing situation, I tend not to listen to songs or rap tunes and follow the lyrics focusedly all the way through - different bits will leap out - the whole idea of a song as a story is a bit foreign to me (although obviously there are exceptions, where there's a narrative pay off, or a sense of build towards something)
"Sessionability" relates to this thing I think is fairly unique about popular music which is repeatability. There are films that you like to watch many times, usually over the course of a life, but sometimes in the first weeks of release, you'll hear of people going multiple times. But almost no one, I should think, would watch a film again immediately after watching it. But that is very common with pop songs - you hear it, you want to hear it again immediately, and possibly again, and again. Or with whole albums.
It's a fairly unique thing with pop music. The way that there's repeatability that doesn't wear out the pleasure. It delivers the hit again and again. (eventually you'll get tired or wish for a bit of variety, but it might not be for a long, long time). In a way it works more like a drug than a dose of culture.
You wouldn't do that with a book. Well, I seem to remember one of my kids finishing the latest Harry Potter then immediately reading it again from the start, reading a little slower to savour it. But generally not... generally it'd be a matter of years before rereading a favorite book, which is a whole unique set of pleasures in itself, almost voluptuous in the sinful sense of not reading all the other books you ought to be reading but indulging this nostalgic delight)
Perhaps it's just to do with the unit-size of the aesthetic object. Songs being in the 2 minute to 6 minute range. Perhaps if films were typically 10 minutes long then people would watch them over and over. But somehow I doubt it.
With other kinds of music, where the duration is longer than in pop, it's probably got less repeatability. Although classical music has kind of been pop-ified, with the most catchy bits pulled out of their context and played on light-classical radio stations.
And maybe it's the non-narrative, non-story nature of most pop songs - they are loops of feeling, emotions freezeframed, or units of action smaller and shorter than a narrative, perhaps more like a vignette or scene - that also contributes to this repeatability. If songs had plots like films, at a certain point the suspense element or resolution element would get worn out.
(Mind you, there are songs like Harry Chapin "Cats in the Cradle" which has an emotional twist in the tale does seem to always work, never wears out. Or story songs like Pulp's "Common People" that you never tire of the narrative. Perhaps the analogy is the anecdote that gets wheeled out over and again, but no one gets fed up with hearing (or telling).
The replayability of video games is oft a selling point. To get into some basic video game theory, video game designers oft receive the lesson to focus on the primary game loop. That is, concentrate on what the player is doing mechanically at the base level. So for instance, in Tetris, the primary gameplay loop would be to slot a falling tetromino into an opportune slot to build up a line, and then the loop repeats again. On top of primary loops, video game designers put secondary loops (say, ammo management) and tertiary loops (narrative progress tends to fall under this). But fundamentally, the idea is that the primary loop is pleasurable in itselt, since the player will perform this base actions many thousands of times. So there is at least one other artform (a relatively nascent one, admittedly) which shares music's capacity for innumerably repeatable enjoyment, and I suggest the concept of the primary gameplay loop is a concrete reason why; like pop music, the primary gameplay loop is also usually of a short duration.
ReplyDelete(It's worth bearing in mind that the primary gameplay loop is exploitable for nefarious means, since its structure is comparable to a Skinner box, and thus a game can collapse into the equivalent of a slot machine.)
Yeah, but video games are games, to make an obvious point. The way they work is not like finished artworks but like sports - they are a lot of molecularized, loop-like movements within sport (certain kinds of kick, certain strokes - a serve in tennis is very close to a perfect loop) but the outcome of those molecularized movements varies (depending on what opponents do to deal with it) and the aggregate of all those moments and responses mean that no match is exactly alike. Same with videogames, which might take on art-like aspects (the environments characters move through, narrative etc) but are fundamentally a different category of experience. They are interactive - whereas art, fundamentally, is not. The decisions have all made by the artist, and we submit to them. It's the finality of art, or music - that it unfolds only in one way, that it creates a feeling "this is how it must be, this is the only way it could be" - that creates parts of it effect. It's not asking for our participation or contributions - it says 'this is so'.
Delete(Okay let's put to one side experimental music with its open-ended scores - I would say that just shoves 'finality' into the hands of the performer rather than the composer, promotes the executor of the score to the same level as the designer of it. And let's also put one side forms of experimental theater that invite the audience's involvement. Most art though, as much as we might interpret it or have a uniquely personal reaction to it, is fundamentally unidirectional, a closed system in the sense of variable outcomes. We react to it, we don't act within it).
There is no reason at all why art can't be interactive. You yourself thought of one or two examples in the parentheses (Two more out of innumerable examples: B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, where the reader chooses in what order to read the 25 chapters in the middle; Yoko Ono's Cut Piece, where the audience was invited to cut away her clothing). Hell, in the visual arts, participatory art is no great revelation anymore. In 2004, one of the entries in the Turner Prize was a video game, a computer simulation of one of Osama bin Laden's hideouts. Video games just have the capacity for interactivity far more than any previous artform. In any case, aren't we living in a world where the author is dead, along with the artist and composer? You can't just appeal to the artist's vision.
DeleteThe main issue with video games vis a vis art is not that they're not art, but that many video games have poor writing. It's still quite a new medium, and it's still got a lot of growing to do. One day, they may get beyond merely trying to replicate First Blood Part II and Scarface.
Just remembered: it's been 10 years since gaming did its own version of Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now.
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNhPMjbgkXA
Repeatability was a central feature of Classical music, back when it was new music in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Composers would very often write repeats into scores, telling performers to go over sections all over again. And in performance, if a movement got a good reaction from the audience, the players would repeat it straight away. Exactly the same as a DJ rewind, really.
ReplyDeleteThere is a famous story about Beethoven being mortified that at the first performance of his 13th string quartet, the audience called for repeats of the second and fourth movements, but not for his wildly ambitious finale, the Grosse Fugue.
Then somehow during the course of the 19th century, repeats went out of fashion. It may be that as works became more self-consciously artistic statements, listening to them came to seem analogous to watching a play or reading a novel, when as you say repeating a section would seem ridiculous. Nowadays there is even a lively debate over whether repeats written into the score by the composer should be respected.
I guess the respectable argument against observing repeats is that in the age of mechanical reproduction of music, the listener can choose their own repeats at any time with a click of the remote control. Before recording, repeating a section might be the only way to get a tune stuck in the audience's heads. But it does seem a bit odd that performers these days are happy just to ignore the composer's explicit intentions.
That is amazing - and how funny that these 18th and 19th century audiences with their powdered wigs and snuff boxes invented the rewind a century or two before Jamaica!
DeleteYes! Although of course our sense of 18th century Europe as a sober and sedate place is a long way from the truth. It's an idea that the movie Amadeus aims for, with a certain amount of success.
DeleteDeath of the composer! Nobody cares about artistic intentions anymore, grandad! ;)
ReplyDeleteI suppose one distinction between how people approach classical and pop/rock music is that with the former, people give more weight to the composer than the performer, whereas the performer is the central figure in pop and rock. As far as I'm aware, Elvis only ever received one songwriting credit, for Love Me Tender. The actual writer of the lyrics, Ken Darby, when asked to accredit it to Elvis, insisted that his wife Vera Matson, saying that she wrote as much of it as Elvis did. The music itself comes from the Civil War ballad Aura Lee, composed by George Poulton. Now, had you heard of either Ken Darby or George Poulton before? I had to look up the names to regale that story. And are either of them more important than Elvis to Elvis' rendition of Love Me Tender?
Or take Holland-Dozier-Holland. Venerated songwriters and producers, yes, but the songs required comparable talent in front of the mike. There's a common fallacy made that if a singer writes their own material, then their music is somehow "worthier". So does that mean Des'ree's Life is necessarily superior to Marvin Gaye's I Heard It Through the Grapevine?
Just remembered, Wagner as a conductor had no hesitancy in altering a piece's tempo in accordance with his aesthetic preferences. At one point, an orchestra employing him had to specify in his contract that he was required to stick to the music as it was written.
Haha fair comment on artistic intentions! Guilty as charged.
ReplyDeleteThat is a great story about Wagner, too. I am no kind of expert, but as I understand it, when Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert were banging out the hits in Vienna in those crazy days 1780-1830, conductors and performers took all sorts of liberties with the tempos. Beethoven as a performer was apparently famous for slowing down and speeding up and using dynamics to express himself in music someone else had written. But everyone was doing it.
To extend the analogy with DJ-ing, possibly beyond breaking point: the score is like the recordings you can use. But when you are playing a set, you can vary the BPMs and highlight certain passages to build excitement. Or it's like playing a cover. Hendrix's All Along The Watchtower obviously owes something to Dylan. But Hendrix emphatically made it his own.
But over the 19th century, those freedoms were taken away, as Classical music evolved from a vibrant modern genre into a received tradition. Hence the complaints about Wagner trying to retain the liberties that his predecessors would have enjoyed 50 years earlier.
Surely one of the central facets about pre-20th century classical music on the scale of the orchestra is its irreproducibility? Without the ability to record, and with the possession of an orchestra only within the ability of the aristocracy, a full orchestral performance could be defined by both its power and its impermance. Over 90% of music throughout history has been completely lost. And there emerges another crucial difference between classical and pop/rock: with pop and rock, the specific noises created by the musicians at the instance of recording are treated as an almost platonic product, whereas a classical rendition is just one more rendition of the score. A performance of Mahler's 1st will be another performance of Mahler's 1st in the long line of performances of Mahler's 1st. Yet we treat Joy Division's two versions of She's Lost Control as two separate songs. That is, we see the classical piece as endlessly reproducible (and historically, lost in the air at the moment of completion), and the rock song as set in stone.
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